Blade Runner 2049

8 comments

1. Nestor says:

   October 7, 2017 at 4:27 am

   I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard that this film changed-up the main female replicant from the appealingly soft, gentle, and feminine Rachel of the first film to a more feminist-approved “strong woman” character. (Barf)

   Again, just something I’ve heard, as I’ve not yet seen the film, but if that is the case, then that would be a source of extreme distaste on my part, and the movie would have to be very good otherwise to make up for it.

   1. Jules says:

      October 8, 2017 at 9:17 am

      The main female replicant in this film is a strong woman. But she’s also ruthless and heartless.

      There’s a scene where she’s getting her nails done while she guides missiles down onto people trying to attack K, and I can’t help but be reminded of the Hillary Clinton-esque religious cult leader from the movie Babylon A.D. where she’s having facial surgery done right before she makes a propaganda telecast.

      If it makes you feel better she’s no lovable figure. And is almost a repudiation of the narrow-minded feminist view of a strong woman.

      Ironically, the whore and the A.I. woman, Joi, are the most attractively feminine characters in the movie. It’s almost as if Society has been so degraded…

      Which leads me on to another point that the white children toiling away in the orphanage under the merciless rule of an aging black Headmaster… Yes that’s technically replicant work but everybody and their environment has been degraded even as technology scales inexorably upwards.

      People literally eat bugs. The slavery of the genetically engineered humans has inevitably leaked over on to what kind of appears to be a dwindling un-engineered human population!

      And when the glimpse of the Marxist Revolt happens, it’s not even some glorious thing. It’s dreadful! You got the horrifying sense that it will be a Slaughter and pull everybody further down the black hole…

      An offer is made to join the Revolt in the same ruthless fashion that the LAPD, Niander Wallace, and his hench woman pursue their own ends.

      K rejects the bloodthirsty revolutionaries, just as he rejects Wallace and his own LAPD. In the end he rejects all the degradation and embraces life and love and demonstrates how he too has a soul. And I think that’s the *literally* transcendent message here.
   2. Ray P says:

      October 9, 2017 at 5:07 am

      It seems the film’s makers have returned to Dick’s more misogynistic view of women; in Androids Dream, Rachael Rosen is secretly working against Deckard, seducing to weaken him, and viciously kills his beloved pet goat. Not soft, gentle or nice

      1. Nestor says:

         October 9, 2017 at 10:15 am

         By misogynistic you mean accurate.

         “Rosen”? PKD actually gave her the last name “Rosen”? Interesting . . .
2. dolph says:

   October 9, 2017 at 2:34 pm

   This is a stunning and gut wrenching film, which builds up hope and then brings it crashing down. For that, I think the film did the best it could possibly do.
   I cannot help but to stand in awe of this movie.
3. Nestor says:

   October 9, 2017 at 4:26 pm

   So I just viewed it.

   In the past, I’ve often agreed with the Counter-Currents reviewer (e.g., I strongly concurred with his praise of Jurassic World and Passengers, both of which were excellent films — indeed, two of my all-time favorites).

   But in this case, I must say that I had the opposite reaction to the movie than the recommendation offered above. I only agree that it goes on for far too long, in a way that mars its basic entertainment value.

   But there’s much more that I loathed about it.

   The plot is indeed rehashed, shopworn Marxism, in a way that is way too on-the-nose even for the typical Leftism of Hollywood.

   I disagree about Gosling’s acting. I found it very flat and one-note. (Yes, I realize that he is performing the “reduced emotional response” of the replicant, but still, most of his expressions in the film are one and the same: a sad puppy-dog look in the eyes. That gets real old real quick.)

   The retconning that this film does to the original movie is unforgivable, diminishing an infinitely superior work in ways that rival Lucas’s tampering with his original trilogy.

   The new pseudo-Tyrell is a trite waste of a villain, another flat, one-note performance, and a character who doesn’t actually do much, apart from a gratuitous knifing scene and a pro-slavery speech, both of which are Snidley-Whiplash-worthy moments that basically announce, “Hey, look at how eeeevil I am.” What a come down from the far more interesting original Tyrell.

   Even the storied visuals of this film I find to be overrated, especially in comparison with the first movie.

   But one particular aspect of the film utterly ruined it for me:

   [spoilers ahead]

   This movie has only one sympathetic character, and she is very sympathetic indeed: the hologram girl that is Gosling’s erstwhile girlfriend. I loved her character, and found the performance by the actress to be engaging and endearing. She is dressed prettily and behaves in a very feminine manner, much like a traditional homemaker. She is vulnerable, graceful, and truly cares for Gosling, in the way a devoted young wife might care about her husband, if our world were still as it should be, and not a Cultural Marxist dystopia. Basically, she is the kind of character that is all but banned by Hollywood, these days.

   So what happens? She is killed halfway through.

   That would have been bad enough to have ruined the film for me, given that she was, as I said, the only character I cared the least bit about; so when she was gone, I had no more interest in the movie.

   But what’s worse is that subsequently, the film defiles her character by implying that she was just a manufactured commodity, and had only been agreeable to Gosling and cared about him because she had been programmed that way. Basically, the movie draws its Marxist, anti-feminine theme in crayon: “See? See? The traditional homemaker of the ’50s was just a product of ‘false consciousness.’ [ugh] Only when each member of the proletariat sacrifices himself for the Revolution is he doing something authentic.”

   I think CCCP cinema would have been embarrassed to wallow in paint-by-numbers anti-traditional-femininity propaganda that way.

   Not for me, thanks.
4. Jeff A. Marlatt says:

   October 16, 2017 at 11:20 am

   An overall lousy movie. Too damn long, too damn boring. I liked seeing that Somali actor Barkad Abdi still is gainfully employed in the film industry. That just goes to show to all these self important drama school types that their job can be done by a person with zero training who was working at his brothers cell phone kiosk in a Minneapolis mall before hitting it big.
5. John Morgan says:

   October 19, 2017 at 3:02 pm

   This review pretty closely mirrors my own response to the film, although concerning this: ‘If Rachel gave birth to a child, and Wallace can create a whole new Rachel, and he has Deckard, then he has both parents. So why does he need the child? Can’t he discover the secret of replication reproduction with the parents alone? And if the child really is a “miracle” — an event that we can’t replicate with natural causes — then even if he had her, there’s nothing he could do.’

   Wallace can produce a replicant that looks like Rachel, but we know that he can’t reproduce her exactly since he even gets her eye color wrong. So presumably Wallace has no idea what it was about Rachel that allowed her to bear a child. However, we know he suspects that it wasn’t just a miracle, and that it was something Tyrell had come up with, since he refers to the birth as “Tyrell’s final trick.” He doesn’t seem very interested in examining Deckard when he finally captures him, so apparently he believes that whatever it was that Tyrell did that allowed Rachel to give birth could only be determined by examining the child. Although this is a little strange…since replicants are designed, presumably whatever was special about Rachel, assuming it wasn’t a miracle, and since Wallace acquires Rachel’s remains early on in the film, presumably he could examine the genetic code left in the remains and figure out what was different about her.

   But ok, let’s presume that Wallace did this and still wasn’t able to find out what it was, so finding the child is the only chance he has left to figure it out. That’s logical. But what is illogical is why he cares in the first place. Apparently producing huge amounts of replicants is the only way for humans to fully colonize space in this reality, but it’s only by enabling replicants to give birth that they can achieve this, since they can’t produce enough in Wallace’s factories to fulfill their needs. Humanity has mastered interstellar travel but they can’t make enough replicants?This rang hollow for me.

   Also, how does Wallace know whether or not the child inherited all of the qualities that make replicants special and valuable in the first place? Since it has a human father, perhaps she’s just an ordinary human, in which case finding it is irrelevant to his aims. Unless just increasing human reproduction would do the trick, in which case it would make more sense to just increase the human birthrate rather than involve replicants at all. But then that’s obviously not an issue since, as you pointed out, they already have Dickensesque factories full of orphans doing manual labor who could be exported offworld.

   So, all in all, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. At least in the original, everyone’s motives made sense – the replicants sought freedom from tyranny and death, and Tyrell wanted to figure out how to control them better so that he could manufacture a more reliable product.

   Still, 2049 is an interesting reversal of the premise of the original – instead of being about a human who finds out she’s a replicant, the sequel is about a replicant who finds out it might be human. Which was interesting, even if it wasn’t explored as fully as it could have been.

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